


Ashen Towns

by euphoricxdystopia



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Abusive Relationships, Angst, Arson, Depression, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, Fugitives, Past Suicide Attempt, Toxic Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 15:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18663133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphoricxdystopia/pseuds/euphoricxdystopia
Summary: Maybe they weren’t all that different, she began to realise: both wanting to escape the hole in their heart that left them drained. Only thing was, Rachel’s voidness needed to be burned, in the wake of feeling anything else than glee. People did weird shit to make themselves happy.Or, Chloe's life went to shit, so she and Rachel burn down towns because that's what sane people do. Arcadia is next, and Chloe wants out.





	Ashen Towns

‘Oregon’s most wanted’

“Hey Chloe, check it out.” Rachel’s smile was cold, cutting into the depths of Chloe’s heart like the dagger they had carved an infinity symbol into the black tree a while back. God, that certain look was way too familiar. Chloe almost didn’t want to know what the other girl was thinking. Shee did, of course. Because one hasn’t spent the years wasting away her life in this cycle of corrupted dreams and expired love without learning anything.

Rachel took a deep drag out her cigarette, mulling over the picture drawn in the paper, proud the way Chloe knew she would be. People did weird shit to make themselves happy.

“We’re famous,” she said, as her eyes danced slyly over the paper’s words. The two of them being attacked with disgusting words and ridiculed for their forbidden love, and the horrible things they did as a big giant f-you to the world. Chloe could see Rachel loved it that way, the same way she was sure of her own name, sure of the things that haunted her past, sure of the things that corrupted her soul and plunged her deeper and deeper into darkness each moment she breathed. Real and tangible, infamously historical.

“I know,” Chloe replied softly -- remorsefully, and didn’t take her eyes from the road.

The plain stretch of uninhabited forest stretched on in front of their eyes as if it never ended, the belting heat suffocated them with the Arcadian sun burning violently in the sky. Chloe knew Rachel wouldn’t turn on the AC, wouldn’t wind up the window. She’d long stopped begging to try.

They didn’t have enough water to last them another day, so the small, ordinary town would have to do as a pit stop, though it was so much more and they both knew it. They didn’t have enough time to pack everything up last time they hit the road, but somehow Chloe questioned if this was all intentional – ending up here, where it all started. This was the only town in miles, Rachel had to have known that.

She tipped the end of the cigarette out of the car window, leaving it down and gave the cig to Chlow as she drove. “Want some?”

She still looked the teenager Chloe had fallen in love with. _They_ still looked like the people they used to be when they had talked about their wishes to conquer the world and dream as if they still had futures.

She still seemed like the home that Arcadia never was.

Sometime ago when the world was anything they made out of it, each kiss or caress or word would plunge her deeper and deeper in love, so deep that it felt like she could drown in it and die the most sweetest of deaths, like their own devastating story of Romeo and Juliet… but now they’re just criminals -- nobodies, the world was fucked, and the dead love is instinctive, familiar and nothing more.

“I… I can’t. I don’t smoke anymore,” Chloe replied, her voice seeping like the void of what emotions she managed to attain these days. She’d learnt pretty quickly that the exhilaration from the ‘jobs’ they did burned off pretty quickly, and the more they travelled, the more it just kept eating away at her -- like a fire.

“Hm,” Rachel scoffed. “No, but you kill yourself in other ways.” she smirked, though her expression alluded to something darker. The illusion of her face made Chloe remember waking up beside it in a room that was too pale and clinical, one that she had only dreamed for half a second was some kind of heaven like she hoped it would’ve been. She was too numb to feel the things she should’ve felt in that moment. She wanted to scream at the nurse who had the eyes of her mom, who told her stories that made her want to _fight_ when she was so, so tired.

Rachel was the one who amplified every emotion that possessed her body like a gun ricocheting against marble tiles. She cried in Chloe’s lap for hours that night, never once saying anything but, “you can’t ever leave me.” The two of them in that tiny hospital bed, all night until someone figured out who they were.

Perhaps that time was just one of those nights that reminded her it was a bad idea to have run from the people who _really_ loved him, or that she was ashamed of the person she’d became and wanted to atone for _all_ of it.

Or perhaps it was one of those nights where he shouldn't have listened to her yesterday's drunken, 3AM self and fallen into a pit of the past because she couldn't fall in love anymore.

“Okay, get out, Sweetheart. I’ll get the gas. You, look for the matches in the trunk.”

Chloe had stopped at a service station without even herself even realising it. Being back here, it was like a beacon had erupted and the whole town was calling he back to it. The moment Chloe took in her surrounding, the more evident it became that she was still an outsider here, and the townspeople all knew it.

They were quaint, and unknown, and none of their dad’s had died, or best friend’s had left them, and turned to the darkest angel for refugee, though that wasn’t their fault. Rachel didn’t see it that way, even Chloe didn’t at first, but she had looked past the exhilaration of watching the world burn before at her hands for ‘justice’ a long time ago.

She got out of the car only to grab Chloe’s wrist. “Don’t, Rach,” she said, not for the first time and probably not for the last because that’s how their dead love work: like a cycle, unbreakable in the worst of ways.

“Don’t worry. I won’t.” Her cold smile plunged Chloe’s heart deeper into the abyss, suffocatingly. She was drowning in expired love, and she and Rachel’s pathetic little world of euphoric dystopia.

Suddenly Chloe realised. Falling out of love wasn’t like the movies. There were no throats screaming until they bled raw, or drowning in tears of hyperventilation in the watercolours of 5AM’s swirling sky. No best Friend there to tell her it would be for the best as they hammered down another burning drink to stifle the tension and their own escape from their woes. No, cinema lied, because Chloe felt void. Nothingness coated her mind like a suffocating, warm blanket -- so familiar that she hadn’t even realised its presence.

The familiarity blocked the emotions she didn’t want to face, the ones that told her to run, to leave everything behind, and to escape from this kind of entrapment that wasn’t so easily escaped. But it was like a drug, she was addicted to someone else, so madly blinded by dead love that it had become the only thing she knew how to do: taste the smoke on her lover’s lip, let it taint her own mouth the way it suffocated her lungs and brain, making the world seem duller and bearable beside her lover’s side. Better than this fucked up reality where she was tortured by all, apart from one (and maybe even then), is what she always told herself.

It was 4AM when Chloe watched the cloud of ash taint her home town and consume it like the fire that had killed the emotions she had left in her heart.

If she was quiet, the blaring alarm of the emergency vehicles could be heard from her spot on the side of the road, along with the high screech of burning tire escaping the ruins and leaving the tragedy for someone else, the way it would do for eternity whether or not Chloe was in the car with Oregon’s most wanted arsonist.

Maybe they weren’t all that different, she began to realise: both wanting to escape the hole in their heart that left them drained. Only thing was, Rachel’s voidness needed to be burned, in the wake of feeling anything else than glee. People did weird shit to make themselves happy.

But for now, Chloe kicked the dirt. It erupted into a cloud of dust, but somehow disrupting the land and air wouldn’t suffice.

Breaking the wooden signs from their posts’ with enough force to tear up the earth wasn't enough.

Throwing discarded glass bottles at the road, only to hear the satisfying sound of a million shards of glass shattering into the air, still wasn't what she wanted.

Somewhere, up in the heavens of the deities she didn’t believe in, the angels were mocking her.

**Author's Note:**

> lmao wrote this for an english assignment, got a 67% yeeeeet.


End file.
